v1.0.0

Happy Halloween! 🎃

We've finally hit a big milestone: the first major version increment, from 0.x to 1.0.0! 🥳

From now on RGBDS will adhere to semantic versioning ("semver"), meaning that you can rely on meaningful version numbers. Breaking changes will be reserved for new major versions; new features will require a minor version update; and bugfixes, internal refactorings, or other small tweaks will be patch-level version updates.

Removed

• Treating multi-value strings as numbers, and the rgbasm -Wnumeric-string warning about doing so
• ldio [c], a/ldio a, [c], and ld [c], a/ld a, [c] (use ldh [c], a/ldh a, [c] instead)
• ldh [$xx], a/ldh a, [$xx] (use ldh [$FFxx], a/ldh a, [$FFxx] instead)

Deprecated

You can pass -Wno-obsolete to silence warnings about these deprecations for now, but they will eventually be removed.

• Treating single-value strings as numbers (use 'c'haracter constants or the CHARVAL function instead)
• 1-indexed string functions STRIN, STRRIN, STRSUB, and CHARSUB (use 0-indexed STRFIND, STRRFIND, STRSLICE, and STRCHAR instead)
• rgbfix -O/--overwrite (use the -Wno-overwrite diagnostic flag instead)

Added

• Error/warning output is $\normalsize{\textsf{\color{#ff0000}c\color{#ff8000}o\color{#cccc00}l\color{#00aa00}o\color{#00aaaa}r\color{#4444ff}f\color{#6600cc}u\color{#ff00aa}l}}$ by default when sent to a terminal; control it with --color always/never/auto, or the NO_COLOR or FORCE_COLOR environment variables
• Add a question mark after macro?, rept?, for?, include? or macro invocations like my_mac?, to "silence" them, excluding them from error/warning location backtraces
• === and !== operators for string comparison, as an alternative to STRCMP
• :: can join db/dw/dl/ds directives as well as instructions onto one line
• __SCOPE__ is an empty string "", ".", or "..", according to the current innermost label scope level
• CHARVAL(str), without an index argument, gets the numeric value of a single-character string
• OPT allows an optional dash before flags to be more like the CLI (e.g. OPT -Wno-obsolete)
• CHARMAP accepts character literals as well as strings (there is no difference in effect)
• -B/--backtrace configures location backtraces for error/warning messages in RGBASM and RGBLINK
• -v/--verbose has multiple levels for RGBASM and RGBLINK too, not just RGBGFX
  _{(RGBFIX's functionality is too simple to need verbose debug output, and it uses the -v flag for something else already)}
• rgbasm -Wexport-undefined warns when you EXPORT an undefined symbol (enabled by -Wall)
• rgblink -Wtruncation supports warning levels =0, =1, or =2, same as rgbasm -Wtruncation
• rgbgfx -c auto explicitly specifies to use the automatic palette generation algorithm
• rgbgfx -c dmg is short for rgbgfx -c dmg=e4
• rgbgfx -O without -o or without any of -A -P -Q -T prints a warning
• Numeric command-line arguments and OPT arguments can use any base prefix: 0x or $ for hex, 0b or % for binary, 0o or & for octal, or nothing for decimal
• rgbasm, rgblink, and rgbfix, as well as rgbgfx already, support @args.flags to read more CLI arguments from an args.flags "at-file"

Changed

• Underscores in integer constants can go after the base prefix, between digits, or before the fixed-point q suffix, but cannot be multiple in a row or trailing
• Too-large integer constants get evaluated as 0
• OPT p argument is decimal by default, and requires 0x prefix for hexadecimal (like OPT Q, OPT r, and CLI -p/--pad-value)
• Leading spaces are stripped from all OPT arguments, not just OPT r
• Spaces are consistently stripped from the beginning and end of macro arguments, even with a block comment in the middle of the spaces
• rgbasm -Wlarge-constant is enabled by default instead of by -Wall
• rgbasm -Wpurge default level is increased from 1 to 2
• rgbasm -Wtruncation and rgblink -Wtruncation default level is reduced from 2 to 1
• RGBLINK .map files will only print ; Next fragment or ; Next union comments when they also have subsequent labels to print
• Reformatted and rephrased some error messages; in particular, location traces are now indented and have one file location per line

Fixed

• bit/res/set with an unknown bit index could segfault
• Division and modulo were off by one for very large negative numbers
• Exporting an undefined symbol is now an error
• A local label after a keyword (e.g. call.local) is now an error
• Labels were allowed before ENDC, which could lead to inconsistent lexing and parsing
• Line numbers after using "nested" macros were incorrect
  _{Macros can be "nested" by defining the inner macro within an EQUS and expanding it}
• Interpolation would fail after an empty string literal (""{example})
• q could be repeated in fixed-point format specs (e.g. STRFMT("%qqq16f", 3.14q16))
• Formatting very long fixed-point numbers could cut off the end (e.g. STRFMT("%#.255q1f", 1073741823.5q1))
• Character literals would be misread after invalid "garbage" characters
• "while expanding symbol" error backtrace was printing the symbol's contents instead of its name
• Too-large integer constants would print a -Wlarge-constant error for every subsequent digit
• Section-related error messages could be inaccurate/misleading after use of [[ fragment literals ]]
• RGBASM's Bash completion script supports -MC
• RGBLINK supports .rel object files generated by SDCC 4.4.0 and later (XL4 instead of XL3)
• RGBGFX could output incorrect attrmap data for bank 1 when bank 0 contained 256 duplicatable tiles (i.e. -N 256,256 without -u)

Thanks to @Rangi42, @ISSOtm, and @ReiquelApplegate for the work done for this release.

v1.0.0-rc2

RGBDS's major version number is finally going to increment from 0 to 1! As of this release, we'll stick to semantic versioning, so that any future breaking changes will require a major version update, new features will be a minor version, and bug fixes will be a patch version. That should make it easier to manage RGBDS version compatibility for assembly projects. (And if a "version 2.0" does eventually come after this one, it might be rewritten in Rust.)

This is a release candidate to help people test it out early, and make sure we won't need to release a 1.0.1 bugfix immediately afterwards.

What's different from v1.0.0-rc1?

• Added: === and !== operators for string comparison, as an alternative to STRCMP
• Added: CHARMAP accepts character literals as well as strings (there is no difference in effect)
• Changed: rgbgfx -O without -o or without any of -A -P -Q -T prints a warning
• Changed: Numeric command-line arguments and OPT arguments can use any base prefix: 0x or $ for hex, 0b or % for binary, 0o or & for octal, or nothing for decimal
• Changed: OPT p argument is decimal by default, and requires 0x prefix for hexadecimal (like OPT Q, OPT r, and CLI -p/--pad-value)
• Changed: Leading spaces are stripped from all OPT arguments, not just OPT r
• Changed: Spaces are consistently stripped from the beginning and end of macro arguments, even with a block comment in the middle of the spaces
• Changed: RGBLINK .map files will only print ; Next fragment or ; Next union comments when they also have subsequent labels to print
• Changed: RGBGFX accurately rounds 8-bit to 5-bit color conversion (and vice-versa for -r/--reverse)
• Fixed: bit/res/set with an unknown bit index could segfault
• Fixed: Formatting very long fixed-point numbers could cut off the end (e.g. STRFMT("%#.255q1f", 1073741823.5q1))
• Fixed: Section-related error messages could be inaccurate/misleading after use of [[ fragment literals ]]

Thanks to @Rangi42, @ISSOtm, and @ReiquelApplegate for the work done for this release.

v1.0.0-rc1

RGBDS's major version number is finally going to increment from 0 to 1! As of this release, we'll stick to semantic versioning, so that any future breaking changes will require a major version update, new features will be a minor version, and bug fixes will be a patch version. That should make it easier to manage RGBDS version compatibility for assembly projects. (And if a "version 2.0" does eventually come after this one, it might be rewritten in Rust.)

This is a release candidate to help people test it out early, and make sure we won't need to release a 1.0.1 bugfix immediately afterwards.

Removed

• Treating multi-value strings as numbers, and the rgbasm -Wnumeric-string warning about doing so
• ldio [c], a/ldio a, [c], and ld [c], a/ld a, [c] (use ldh [c], a/ldh a, [c] instead)
• ldh [$xx], a/ldh a, [$xx] (use ldh [$FFxx], a/ldh a, [$FFxx] instead)

Deprecated

• Treating single-value strings as numbers (use 'c'haracter constants or the CHARVAL function instead)
• 1-indexed string functions STRIN, STRRIN, STRSUB, and CHARSUB (use 0-indexed STRFIND, STRRFIND, STRSLICE, and STRCHAR instead)
• rgbfix -O/--overwrite (use the -Wno-overwrite diagnostic flag instead)

Added

• Error/warning output is $\normalsize{\textsf{\color{#ff0000}c\color{#ff8000}o\color{#cccc00}l\color{#00aa00}o\color{#00aaaa}r\color{#4444ff}f\color{#6600cc}u\color{#ff00aa}l}}$ by default when sent to a terminal; control it with --color always/never/auto, or the NO_COLOR or FORCE_COLOR environment variables
• Add a question mark after macro?, rept?, for?, include? or macro invocations like my_mac?, to "silence" them, excluding them from error/warning location backtraces
• :: can join db/dw/dl/ds directives as well as instructions onto one line
• CHARVAL(str), without an index argument, gets the numeric value of a single-character string
• OPT allows an optional dash before flags to be more like the CLI (e.g. OPT -Wno-obsolete)
• -B/--backtrace configures location backtraces for error/warning messages in RGBASM and RGBLINK
• -v/--verbose has multiple levels for RGBASM and RGBLINK too, not just RGBGFX
  _{(RGBFIX's functionality is too simple to need verbose debug output, and it uses the -v flag for something else already)}
• rgbasm -Wexport-undefined warns when you EXPORT an undefined symbol (enabled by -Wall)
• rgblink -Wtruncation supports warning levels =0, =1, or =2, same as rgbasm -Wtruncation
• rgbgfx -c auto explicitly specifies to use the automatic palette generation algorithm
• rgbgfx -c dmg is short for rgbgfx -c dmg=e4

Changed

• Underscores in integer constants can go after the base prefix, between digits, or before the fixed-point q suffix, but cannot be multiple in a row or trailing
• Too-large integer constants get evaluated as 0
• rgbasm -Wlarge-constant is enabled by default instead of by -Wall
• Reformatted and rephrased some error messages; in particular, location traces are now indented and have one file location per line

Fixed

• Division and modulo were off by one for very large negative numbers
• Exporting an undefined symbol is now an error
• Line numbers after using "nested" macros were incorrect
  _{Macros can be "nested" by defining the inner macro within an EQUS and expanding it}
• Interpolation would fail after an empty string literal (""{example})
• q could be repeated in fixed-point format specs (e.g. STRFMT("%qqq16f", 3.14q16))
• Character literals would be misread after invalid "garbage" characters
• "while expanding symbol" error backtrace was printing the symbol's contents instead of its name
• Too-large integer constants would print a -Wlarge-constant error for every subsequent digit
• RGBASM's Bash completion script supports -MC
• RGBLINK supports .rel object files generated by SDCC 4.4.0 and later (XL4 instead of XL3)

Thanks to @Rangi42 and @ISSOtm for the work done for this release.

v0.9.4

We're still not following SemVer yet, so this release has a lot in it even though it's "only" a patch-level update -- comparable to v0.3.9, v0.4.2, v0.5.2...

Added

• Inline [[ fragment literals ]] can be used instead of labels for one-off data
• 'character' constants are now preferred to single-character "strings" for getting the numeric value of a character
• READFILE(name[, maxlen]) returns the contents of a file as a string
• BYTELEN(str) returns the number of bytes in a string
• STRBYTE(str, idx) returns the idxth byte in a string
• SIZEOF applies to 8-and 16-bit registers, evaluating to their 1- or 2-byte size
• -W warning diagnostics for RGBLINK, RGBFIX, and RGBGFX
• rgbasm -MC flag which continues assembling even after a missing dependency (unlike -MG, which exits to let the dependency be generated before continuing)
• rgbasm -P can be specified multiple times to pre-include multiple files
• Linkerscripts support 0x/0b/0o/& numeric prefixes, _ numeric separators, and "\0" characters, same as assembly
• rgbgfx -c/--colors supports png: for PNG images as palette spec inputs
• rgbgfx -l/--base-palette sets a base palette ID, like -b/--base-tiles does for tilemap IDs
• rgbfix -m list does the same thing as rgbfix -m help (lists supported MBCs)
• Documented some more historical deprecations/removals which had been left out of rgbasm-old(5)

Changed

• Error message for ALIGN failure tells you what the actual alignment is
• Invalid rgblink -S/--scramble or rgbfix -f/--fix-spec arguments are a fatal error, not a warning

Fixed

• Aligning a section first to one size and then to a greater size could fail even when the new alignment is compatible
• Some string functions treated \0 characters in strings as the end of the string
• Overflowing exponent operator ** could cause undefined behavior
• Invalid warning flag parameters could be silently accepted, e.g. rgbasm -Wtruncation=256 acting like =0
• Unterminated strings in linkerscripts would break subsequent parsing
• Invalid rgblink -S/--scramble spec could crash
• Out-of-bounds rgbgfx -L/--slice coordinates could crash
• RGBGFX was skipping a step of its palette generation algorithm
• rgbfix -m with unlisted numeric values could crash
• The rgbds:latest Docker tag is correctly updated

Thanks to @Rangi42 and @avivace for the work done for this release.

v0.9.3

Happy Pride month! 🏳️‍🌈

Added

• CHARVAL function gets individual values from a multi-value charmap entry
• ++ operator for string concatenation, as an alternative to STRCAT
• rgbgfx -c can take a dmg=XX DMG grayscale palette specification (works like rBGP)

Changed

• Restrict custom binary and graphics digits to digits, letters, ., #, or @
• Recover from syntax errors even inside REPT/FOR loops
• Hint to {interpolate} names when EQUS expanding does not occur
• .sym file sorting accounts for local labels' parents' addresses and names
• rgbgfx -r encodes reversed PNG images as grayscale or indexed colors when possible
• Omit the version number from distributed release archive filenames

Fixed

• STRSLICE with two arguments assumed an off-by-one stop index
• rgbasm -MP would generate phony dependencies even for files that don't exist
• Handle missing newline at EOF for linkerscript INCLUDEd files
• The Dockerfile was building but not installing RGBDS in its environment
• Building with Bison versions 3.x below 3.5 could fail over "parse.lac=full"
• A second rgbgfx -c argument might not completely override the previous one

Thanks to @Rangi42 and @ISSOtm for the work done for this release.

v0.9.2

May the 4th be with you! ⭐ 👾

Added

• New 0-indexed string functions (we plan to eventually deprecate the old 1-indexed ones):
  • STRFIND and STRRFIND: like STRIN and STRRIN
  • STRCHAR: like CHARSUB
  • STRSLICE: like STRSUB, but taking start and stop indexes, instead of a start position and length
• CHARCMP: compares two strings by their charmap value sequences
• CHARSIZE: counts how many charmap values a single character would map to
• REVCHAR: reverse-maps a value sequence to its charmap string (the values must have one unique corresponding charmap)
• Allow macro \<arg> to take negative values to count arguments from the end (e.g. \<-2> is the penultimate arg)
• Allow the index of bit/res/set instructions to be determined at link time
• rgbgfx -B/--background specifies a "background" color; tiles entirely of that color will be skipped in the graphic output
• rgbfix -o/--output can write its output to a different file than its input (must have one input file); thanks @jmillikin!

Changed

• Raw symbols do not undergo EQUS expansion (so #symbol can be used instead of "{symbol}")
• Some invalid instructions have more specific error messages than just "syntax error"
• Terser RGBASM output for sequences of unknown characters
• contrib/gbdiff.bash does not need a .sym file to be sorted

Fixed

• Macro names could be used as numeric symbols with value 0
• Map files were listing anonymous labels (as Unicode escape syntax)
• RGBGFX could segfault with transparent colors in embedded palettes
• RGBGFX could segfault or give incorrect output for grayscale images with transparent colors
• RGBFIX expects nonzero -r/--ram-size for -m MBC6 (the one game that uses MBC6 has -r 3)
• CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG can be user-specified

Thanks to @Rangi42 and @ISSOtm for the work done for this release.

v0.9.1

Happy (belated) New Year! 🎊 🐍

Our GitHub Actions CI now tests RGBDS in Cygwin x64 and FreeBSD 15.0, verifying that it can build and run correctly on those platforms.

Added

• All programs now support -h or --help arguments to print usage information

Changed

• ld [$ff00+c], a and ld a, [$ff00+c] instruction syntax is not deprecated any more!
  • The 0.9.0 release deprecated ld [c], a and ld a, [c] (since ldh [c], a and ldh a, [c] are more appropriate), but also deprecated the [$ff00+c] syntax, which this release undoes
• The undocumented 99,999-argument limit for macros was removed
• Floating sections may be output in a different order

Fixed

• Fix undefined behavior with backslash at EOF in macro arguments
• Avoid errors after missing INCLUDE with -MG
• Object files used the MACRO node type for FILE nodes since 0.8.0
• STRLEN and STRSUB would cut off early on incomplete UTF-8 strings
• CHARLEN and CHARSUB would cut off early on invalid UTF-8 strings
• RGBGFX -u deduplication would fail without an input or output tileset (e.g. only an output tilemap+attrmap)
• RGBFIX could output an incorrect ROM if a write syscall did not write all the bytes given to it
• Correct the gbz80(7) documentation for the DAA instruction

Thanks to @Rangi42 and @ISSOtm , @robbi-blechdose , @avivace for the work done for this release.

v0.9.0

Merry Christmas everyone! 🎅 🎄

Tip

Starting with this release, we publish universal ("fat") binaries for macOS, so they'll support x86-64 and newer ARM (“Apple Silicon”) CPUs!

⚠️ Deprecated

• Treating multi-character strings as numbers (you can use a single 32-bit character mapping instead)
• ldio (use ldh instead)
• ld [c] (use ldh instead)
• ldh [$xx] (use ldh [$FFxx] instead)

We now document RGBDS's history of deprecated and removed/replaced features in rgbasm-old.5.

Added

• The contrib/view_palettes.sh script lets you render a GBC .pal file as an image
• RGBASM -s outputs a "state file", listing the values of (non-label) symbols when finished assembling
• RGBASM -Wpurge warns when purging exported symbols or labels
• RGBASM -Wunmatched-directive warns when PUSHC, PUSHO, or PUSHS lacks a POPC, POPO, or POPS
• Symbols can have non-leading $ characters (so an interpolated prefix{numeric} symbol works)
• Symbols can have the same names as reserved keywords by prefixing them with a #
• CHARMAP can map characters to sequences of multiple values, with values not limited to 8 bits
• A string constant . (period) which expands to the current global label scope
• A string constant .. (two periods) which expands to the current fully-qualified local label scope (e.g. Global.local)
• 0x, 0b, and 0o prefixes for hex, binary, and octal numbers (in addition to $, %, and &)
• LOAD FRAGMENT (removed in 0.5.1 due to bugs; we're not totally certain that all bugs are fixed, testing is appreciated!)
• BITWIDTH(n) returns the number of bits necessary to represent n
• TZCOUNT(n) returns the count of trailing zero bits of n
• EXPORT DEF defines and exports a numeric symbol in a single line
• PUSHC name acts like PUSHC followed by SETCHARMAP name
• PUSHS ... acts like PUSHS followed by SECTION ...
• PUSHO ... acts like PUSHO followed by OPT ...
• ENDL is explicitly optional, but with an opt-in -Wunterminated-load warning about it
• cpl can also be written as cpl a
• Allow a no- prefix to negate "meta" warnings (-Wno-all, -Wno-extra, -Wno-everything)
• Allow -Wno-error=... to override -Werror (including for "meta" warnings)
• RGBLINK supports e.g. ROMX FLOATING in linker scripts, which allows assigning a section to no particular bank (this is generally only useful with SDCC object files)
• RGBLINK's .sym file now includes exported numeric constants (if this breaks your tools, please check the .sym specification!)
• RGBGFX -i/--input-tileset uses a given tileset instead of generating all the tiles itself
• RGBGFX -r 0 infers a valid width for the reversed image
• RGBGFX -X or -Y only mirror tiles horizontally or vertically (-X -Y acts like -m)

Changed

• Macro invocations can be at column 1, the very start of a line
• ** exponent operator is right-associative (so p ** q ** r == p ** (q ** r))
• LOW(Label) can be constant if Label is aligned to 8 or more bits
• !expr can be constant 0 if expr has any non-zero bits
• Error messages for undefined symbols mention if the symbol was previously purged
• Sections that grew too big are reported after the whole assembly file has been processed
• When RGBLINK encounters an unknown symbol, it lists the potential un-exported symbols by that name
• RGBLINK reports source locations for conflicts between object files
• Escape characters in section names in map files, and format empty sections more consistently too
• RGBGFX -r gives a detailed warning if -c and -p mismatch; improved several other error messages too
• LOW() and HIGH() have their own RPN operators in the object file (this should lead to nicer output from rgbobj)
• Clarified a lot of documentation, including for fixed-point numbers, macros, and DAA
• Explicitly document that FMOD behaves differently than %
• Increment object file revision number to 11
• Tests can be run with CTest if you use CMake

Fixed

• Label & CONSTANT was not actually doing the & operation!
• Some nonsensical uses of empty local labels (Global.) were ignored
• Many bugs prevented SDCC object files from being processed correctly (special thanks to @RubenZwietering for helping with bugfixing and testing!)
• Crash when assembling a nonexistent file
• Crash when INCLUDEing an unbounded-size file (e.g. /dev/urandom)
• Crash when passing an object file with invalid patch offsets to RGBLINK
• Crash when specifying palette files within RGBGFX at-files
• Crash when reversing an image if the tilemap referred to nonexistent tiles
• Multiple bugs with parsing text palette files (GPL, HEX, and PSP)
• Reversing a 1bpp image had incorrect tile data
• Palette generation was suboptimal, potentially failing to fit within 8 palettes
• Palette generation was also inconsistent between platforms
• Tiles with too many colors were being detected incorrectly
• Maximum number of palettes wrapped around after 255
• Allow text palette files to have the maximum number of colors
• Allow tab character after backslash for line continuation
• Syntax errors at the beginning of a line do not abort assembly
• -Wall did not enable -Wcharmap-redef
• -Wnested-comment was undocumented
• Building works on BSD systems
• Building works on systems with bison 3.8.0

Thanks to @Rangi42 and @ISSOtm , @JL2210 , @avivace , @sukus21 for the work done for this release.

v0.9.0-rc2

Tip

Starting with this release, we publish universal ("fat") binaries for macOS, so they'll support x86-64 and newer ARM (“Apple Silicon”) CPUs!

⚠️ Deprecated

• Treating multi-character strings as numbers (you can use a single 32-bit character mapping instead)

Added

• RGBASM -s outputs a "state file", listing the values of (non-label) symbols when finished assembling
• RGBASM -Wpurge warns when purging exported symbols or labels
• Symbols can have non-leading $ characters (so an interpolated prefix{numeric} symbol works)
• Symbols can have the same names as reserved keywords by prefixing them with a #
• CHARMAP can map characters to sequences of multiple values, with values not limited to 8 bits
• A string constant . (period) which expands to the current global label scope
• A string constant .. (two periods) which expands to the current fully-qualified local label scope (e.g. Global.local)
• 0x, 0b, and 0o prefixes for hex, binary, and octal numbers (in addition to $, %, and &)
• BITWIDTH(n) returns the number of bits necessary to represent n
• TZCOUNT(n) returns the count of trailing zero bits of n
• EXPORT DEF defines and exports a numeric symbol in a single line
• PUSHC name acts like PUSHC followed by SETCHARMAP name
• PUSHS ... acts like PUSHS followed by SECTION ...
• PUSHO ... acts like PUSHO followed by OPT ...
• ENDL is explicitly optional, but with an opt-in -Wunterminated-load warning about it
• cpl can also be written as cpl a
• Allow a no- prefix to negate "meta" warnings (-Wno-all, -Wno-extra, -Wno-everything)
• Allow -Wno-error=... to override -Werror (including for "meta" warnings)
• RGBLINK supports e.g. ROMX FLOATING in linker scripts, which allows assigning a section to no particular bank (this is generally only useful with SDCC object files)
• RGBLINK's .sym file now includes exported numeric constants (if this breaks your tools, please check the .sym specification!)
• RGBGFX -i/--input-tileset uses a given tileset instead of generating all the tiles itself
• RGBGFX -r 0 infers a valid width for the reversed image
• RGBGFX -X or -Y only mirror tiles horizontally or vertically (-X -Y acts like -m)
• The contrib/view_palettes.sh script lets you render a GBC .pal file as an image

Changed

• Macro invocations can be at column 1, the very start of a line
• LOW(Label) can be constant if Label is aligned to 8 or more bits
• !expr can be constant 0 if expr has any non-zero bits
• Error messages for undefined symbols mention if the symbol was previously purged
• Sections that grew too big are reported after the whole assembly file has been processed
• When RGBLINK encounters an unknown symbol, it lists the potential un-exported symbols by that name
• RGBLINK reports source locations for conflicts between object files
• RGBGFX -r gives a detailed warning if -c and -p mismatch; improved several other error messages too
• LOW() and HIGH() have their own RPN operators in the object file (this should lead to nicer output from rgbobj)
• Clarified a lot of documentation, including for fixed-point numbers and macros
• Explicitly document that FMOD behaves differently than %
• Increment object file revision number to 11
• Tests can be run with CTest if you use CMake

Fixed

• Label & CONSTANT was not actually doing the & operation!
• Some nonsensical uses of empty local labels (Global.) were ignored
• Many bugs prevented SDCC object files from being processed correctly (special thanks to @RubenZwietering for helping with bugfixing and testing!)
• Crash when assembling a nonexistent file
• Crash when INCLUDEing an unbounded-size file (e.g. /dev/urandom)
• Crash when passing an object file with invalid patch offsets to RGBLINK
• Crash when specifying palette files within RGBGFX at-files
• Crash when reversing an image if the tilemap referred to nonexistent tiles
• Multiple bugs with parsing text palette files (GPL, HEX, and PSP)
• Palette generation was suboptimal, potentially failing to fit within 8 palettes
• Tiles with too many colors were being detected incorrectly
• Maximum number of palettes wrapped around after 255
• Allow text palette files to have the maximum number of colors
• Allow tab character after backslash for line continuation
• -Wall did not enable -Wcharmap-redef
• -Wnested-comment was undocumented
• Building works on BSD systems
• Building works on systems with bison 3.8.0

v0.9.0-rc1

Tip

Starting with this release, we publish universal ("fat") binaries for macOS, so they'll support x86-64 and newer ARM (“Apple Silicon”) CPUs!

⚠️ Deprecated

• Treating multi-character strings as numbers (you can use a single 32-bit character mapping instead)

Added

• RGBASM -s outputs a "state file", listing the values of (non-label) symbols when finished assembling
• RGBASM -Wpurge warns when purging exported symbols or labels
• Symbols can have non-leading $ characters (so an interpolated prefix{numeric} symbol works)
• Symbols can have the same names as reserved keywords by prefixing them with a #
• CHARMAP can map characters to sequences of multiple values, with values not limited to 8 bits
• A string constant . (period) which expands to the current global label scope
• A string constant .. (two periods) which expands to the current fully-qualified local label scope (e.g. Global.local)
• BITWIDTH(n) returns the number of bits necessary to represent n
• TZCOUNT(n) returns the count of trailing zero bits of n
• EXPORT DEF defines and exports a numeric symbol in a single line
• PUSHC name acts like PUSHC followed by SETCHARMAP name
• PUSHS ... acts like PUSHS followed by SECTION ...
• PUSHO ... acts like PUSHO followed by OPT ...
• cpl can also be written as cpl a
• RGBLINK supports e.g. ROMX FLOATING in linker scripts, which allows assigning a section to no particular bank (this is generally only useful with SDCC object files)
• RGBLINK's .sym file now includes exported numeric constants (if this breaks your tools, please check the .sym specification!)
• RGBGFX -i/--input-tileset uses a given tileset instead of generating all the tiles itself
• RGBGFX -r 0 infers a valid width for the reversed image
• RGBGFX -X or -Y only mirror tiles horizontally or vertically (-X -Y acts like -m)
• The contrib/view_palettes.sh script lets you render a GBC .pal file as an image

Changed

• LOW(Label) can be constant if Label is aligned to 8 or more bits
• !expr can be constant 0 if expr has any non-zero bits
• Error messages for undefined symbols mention if the symbol was previously purged
• Sections that grew too big are reported after the whole assembly file has been processed
• When RGBLINK encounters an unknown symbol, it lists the potential un-exported symbols by that name
• RGBLINK reports source locations for conflicts between object files
• RGBGFX -r gives a detailed warning if -c and -p mismatch; improved several other error messages too
• LOW() and HIGH() have their own RPN operators in the object file (this should lead to nicer output from rgbobj)
• Clarified a lot of documentation, including for fixed-point numbers and macros
• Explicitly document that FMOD behaves differently than %
• Increment object file revision number to 11

Fixed

• Label & CONSTANT was not actually doing the & operation!
• Some nonsensical uses of empty local labels (Global.) were ignored
• Many bugs prevented SDCC object files from being processed correctly (special thanks to @RubenZwietering for helping with bugfixing and testing!)
• Crash when assembling a nonexistent file
• Crash when INCLUDEing an unbounded-size file (e.g. /dev/urandom)
• Crash when passing an object file with invalid patch offsets to RGBLINK
• Crash when specifying palette files within RGBGFX at-files
• Crash when reversing an image if the tilemap referred to nonexistent tiles
• Multiple bugs with parsing text palette files (GPL, HEX, and PSP)
• Palette generation was suboptimal, potentially failing to fit within 8 palettes
• Maximum number of palettes wrapped around after 255
• Allow text palette files to have the maximum number of colors
• Building works on systems with bison 3.8.0